


Bloody But Unbow'd

by wocket



Category: Real Person Fiction
Genre: Bombs, F/M, M/M, POV Second Person, Polyamory, Recreational Drug Use, Road Trips, Threesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 00:16:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21065576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wocket/pseuds/wocket
Summary: You spend years lying for Tim McVeigh.





	Bloody But Unbow'd

You don’t know when Tim started looking at you that way.

You’ve always been close, but sometime between combat jerks and puffs of marijuana smoke Tim has started to look at you like _that_, his eyes full of something deeper than friendship and convenience, something more than just passing time. 

Tim stays with you for an entire week at the start of 1993.

You introduce Tim to pot first. If he thought you were a heavy user in the Army, he hasn’t seen anything yet. After Tim smokes he gets quiet and introspective and you grin at the way Tim melts into the couch, sleepy and stoned. He keeps dozing off while sitting straight up like an idiot.

There’s a rerun of _The Simpsons_ on TV, one of Tim’s favorite episodes, but neither of you are paying much attention. It’s the one where Lisa learns how unjust your government really is and condemns the American political regime and their stench of corruption. Oh, poor, naive Lisa Simpson.

“Hey, sleepyhead.”

“My neck is killing me,” Tim complains, a hand on the back of his neck.

“Come here, stupid,” you say. You’re lifting up your arm to make room for him before you really know what you’re doing, a stoned choice if there ever was one. 

Tim scoots over and leans his head back on your shoulder. “Much better,” he observes.

_It _is_ comfy_, you think absent-mindedly. Your arm settles around his shoulders. You’re a natural fit.

*

That summer Tim starts traveling out of your mobile home in Kingman, Arizona to work the gun show circuit, selling whatever he can, books, bumper stickers, rifles. You manage to get him back to yourself for a weekend, and you wait until Saturday night to show Tim your little surprise. Ganja is great, but crystal meth is fucking incredible, and you’re desperate to share the experience with Tim. 

Tim’s too gun-shy to snort it, so he mixes it with Gatorade as you blaze ahead. He’s a little hesitant at first, but he trusts you. Tim’s in good hands.

Ice makes you euphoric, pleasure centers in your brain flooded with dopamine. You can tell Tim likes the sensation (who _doesn’t_?). You can tell he feels good. You’re on top of the world together for the night, even from the confines of a shitty trailer on the western edge of Arizona.

“You should try fucking on crystal,” you tell him, thinking nothing of it, but he really seems to be thinking it over. It’s not an invitation, but it’s enough to temper his fears or hesitations, because Tim leans in and kisses you. 

You feel yourself closing your eyes, giving in. Your body feels electric, Tim’s hand sliding up your bicep.

“Show me,” he tells you, and it’s one more thing you share.

*

Not long after, Tim decides to stay in Kingman. He rents a trailer off Old Route 66. Tim is fickle, though, and he leaves Arizona in the fall to live on the Nichols’ farm in Michigan. It’s not six months later that he’s calling you, stressed and unhappy, begging to come back to the southwest. 

Your girlfriend is going to kill you for this, but you tell Tim that you always have a place for him here.

*

Tim moves in with you for a few days, but things are different with your girlfriend Lori around, so Tim finds a block house over the mountain range in Golden Valley less than five miles from your trailer that he starts to turn into his weird little bunker.

You get Tim a job working at Cotter and Company, a distributor for the hardware store that you work at in downtown Kingman. You spend your free time together sitting around the house talking shit about almost anything - gun control, sports, conspiracy theories, weapons. You snort crystal together when Lori’s at work. 

“The U.S. Government has declared war on the American public. They are actively taking our rights away,” Tim waxes eloquent, but it’s the same discussion you’ve had time and time again.

Lori watches you with a critical eye. Sometimes things feel too volatile with Tim and Lori both in the house, so you and Tim take to walking in the desert together. You’re abstractly reminded of Jesus in the desert with the devil, though you don’t know who is who.

*

In the middle of a hot July night in the summer of 1994, you and Tim sneak out to Area 51. It takes all day to get through Arizona and New Mexico to the highly classified government facility but you think of it as a last hurrah, one final night for the boys before you tie the knot. Tim’s been out to Roswell before, so he drives your car out to the edge of the testing fields.

You’re not sure what Tim expects to find. Not aliens - evidence of government cover-ups, maybe, or military tech.

You notice the warning signs prohibiting trespassers and photography, but Tim pays them no mind. He always marches to the beat of his own drummer. He manages to get a few photographs with his camera before you spy headlights down the road. You tug him down from his perch and haul ass back to the car and hit the road before some sucker with an M-16 pulls you in for a misdemeanor.

*

You marry Lori two weeks later on July 25, 1994 at a casino in Las Vegas. She’s perfect for you. Tim is your best man. It feels right, the three of you standing up there together, some new American Dream.

*

Some nights you spend hours getting high with Tim, swapping stories and looking at the stars. Your brain moves fast and your eyes try to keep up, trying to track every single star in the sky. 

Tonight is not one of those nights. Tonight, Lori’s cuddling with you on the couch while Tim stalks around the living room. Evidence of your night’s exploits is scattered on the coffee table in front of the couch, empty baggies, sports drinks, a pipe.

Tim can’t hold still. Crystal gets him wired. 

“If only I could put that energy to use,” you joke to an over-stimulated Tim, focusing on his mouth. It’s a fairly ambiguous statement but your wife, who is keen even when she’s high, puts her hand on your knee.

“Mike, I wish you would,” she sighs.

Tim keeps pacing but you reach out and grab his hand and _pull_. He comes tumbling down onto the sofa beside you, thin limbs akimbo. You wait for him to rearrange himself before putting a hand on the back of his head and tugging him closer for a kiss. You’ve done this before, except now you have company.

Tim stops and looks at Lori - as if now he’s suddenly having second thoughts about propriety - but her face says go ahead. He lets you resume the kiss.

You remember to turn back to Lori before you get too into it, pressing a kiss to her cheek first, then her lips. 

Tim’s always nervous around women and Lori’s no different. His shaky hand caresses her knee as you kiss him, nipping at his lip the way you know he likes, trying to goad him into being a little more forceful. 

Tim crawls into your lap, and you try to hide your immediate interest, though Lori seems to encourage it, tangling her fingers in your long hair.

Tim finally takes a break from kissing you to kiss your wife, and you know he can feel your growing erection from his spot on your lap.

Lori licks his mouth open, encouraging him, and you smile, pleased that you’ve found a way to make them play nice, a way to make them share. Lori and Tim have always been jealous of each other despite your best efforts.

You kiss Tim again and taste Lori’s lip gloss on his mouth, and then you’re grabbing them both and leading them toward your bedroom, hands and heart full. You make it your personal challenge to wear them out until they fall asleep.

*

Tim’s a wanderer; he’s always been one. He’s a hard man to pin down, thinking nothing of driving several hundred miles in a day. From state to state, he comes and goes as he pleases, but you learned before that he can’t stay away, and that never changes. 

Your phone rings a few days before Christmas, and it’s Tim on the other end, the way it so often is. He calls and writes regularly, even when he’s traveling. Tim tells you he’s holed up in a motel room across town and wants to see you before asking for a wooden rifle stock, some Christmas wrapping paper, a couple of boxes, some tape, and scissors.

You bring everything he asks for.

Tim trades you an M-16 for the wooden stock. He tries to take the stock from you at first, but you tell him no. He pulls out the weapon and asks if it would do in trade, which, of course it would.

Tim shows you a box full of blasting caps next. “This is why I need the boxes,” he explains. “I’m going to divide these up. You’re going to sell them in Michigan for $2500 apiece.” You decipher that the wrapping paper must be to throw anyone off the scent.

Tim is the one who comes up with both the scheme and the route for the road trip (he usually is). It’s an opportunity too good to pass up, more M-16 rifles and blasting caps, yours for the taking, even if the story behind how he acquired them is hinky. All you have to do is go with him to Kansas.

He lets you think driving together is your idea. You don’t want to take the Jeep and Tim insists that riding a Greyhound bus would be too dangerous.

By 0800, you’re on the road together. You take turns driving in shifts. Tim’s an alert driver and an apt navigator, but most of all, a good travel companion. You’ve always found him easy to talk to.

You’re driving the car and Tim is examining your surroundings when he spots a Ryder truck and points it out to you. You don’t see what the big deal is, but he continues talking. “That’s the type I’m thinking of using. Maybe the next size up…” You keep driving past and he points to the wheel well of the truck. “Look, in the larger truck, the back portion sits on top of the wheel instead of going around it. The weight measurements are on the side of the door. 18,000 pounds.” He swallows. “I might have to stay inside the cab to make sure the bomb goes off.”

You look away from the truck, not surprised to see the same stoic look on Tim’s face, though you expect something different after what is essentially a suicide threat. “You want to kill yourself?”

“It’s not about ‘want’, Mike,” Tim says to you, matter-of-fact.

You shake your head. “This is stupid.”

“No. This is necessary.”

“Tim, what you need to do is stand on the street corners and tell people the truth. In the next ten years, you'd be much more effective than doing something like this.” You try to convince him, but Tim is strong-willed, with a mind of his own.

Tim takes a deep breath. “I don’t think talking is accomplishing anything. I'm going to sit inside that truck, and if anybody tries to stop it from blowing up, I’m going to blow them away.”

It effectively kills the conversation.

Texas is bigger than you expected - you forget how large America really is sometimes - and you drive east on I-40 through countless miles of dense prairie. As you near Amarillo at sunset, from the highway you spot a row of Cadillacs with their hoods buried in the dirt. The cars are tagged in rainbow graffiti, a swirling mess of psychedelia; the bizarre sight is like a trippy Stonehenge made from junkers, a mirage in the endless grassland. It’s the last thing you see before stopping for the night at a Motel 6. 

The next day you make a twenty-minute pit stop in Oklahoma City that you think nothing of at the time. That’s what you tell yourself. If you don’t know why you’re there, then why do you get nervous and ask Tim to leave?

Once you enter Kansas, though, you get off the interstate and zig-zag along state highways on your way to Junction City. Tim explains why he doesn’t want to use the toll roads, telling you how they photograph your license plate as you pass through the tollbooth.

On the drive, Tim gives you pointers on how to speak and act at gun shows, tips for making sales. He advises you to lean on your military bearing. “And you need to shave,” he commands, reaching a thumb up to brush against your scruff. It’s an affectionate gesture coming from Tim, one of the last you remember.

Your destination is a storage shed in Council Grove. Tim shows you the stash stolen from Bob, maybe thirty firearms, and tells you that you can keep 50% of the profit from whatever you can unload at a gun show. He loads up everything in the trunk and that’s it, you’re done.

You remembered to bring a little weed, so you smoke a joint while Tim fills the car up with gas. He only takes a hit or two but the munchies hit you both hard, and you stop first at a Pizza Hut, then a Wendy’s.

Tim rents you a room at a run-down motel, making you wait in the car so he can rent the room under one person and save a few bucks. “They’ll still give us two beds,” he explains, like it matters. You indulge his paranoia; what’s it to you?

He’s right, though, and he comes back a few minutes later with a room key. You’re desperate to shower; Tim lets you go first so he can drag the box out of the car and start going through the guns and ammo. You can hear him shuffling around in the hotel room as you wash the day away.

By the time you reappear, toweling your long hair dry, Tim’s managed to divide the stuff up. He gives you two pistols and some ammunition, and he keeps what’s left. It’s not what you expected from the deal. He’s been doing this more and more lately, taking advantage of you, manipulating you.

Tim distracts you from it all with a kiss, though, and exhausted, indulgent, your coherent thoughts end there.

*

In the weeks after your road trip, Tim gets increasingly vocal in promoting his apocalyptic world view. He becomes cagey and defensive. You don’t know if he’s using more or what, but there’s a paranoia there that sets you on edge. At the same time, he can be his usual sweet self, helping you care for your injured shoulder, driving you to your appointments. Tim goes with you on the therapeutic hikes your doctor orders. It’s enjoyable, and you start thinking of it as your time together, a welcome relief. 

Tim helps you so you help him when he asks for money. You refuse to max out your own accounts, but you send away for a false ID kit so that Tim can rip off the credit card companies and get credit cards of his own.

Things start to change when Tim starts asking you to keep secrets from Lori. You won’t agree to it, naturally, and that’s when he starts keeping secrets from _you_. It’s when he begins to call you names and give you dirty looks. You just start getting a negative vibe, something you’d never felt from him before, because he gets real quiet and won’t talk to you. Tim’s generally ambiguous behavior becomes incomprehensible. You think this must be the beginning of the end. 

_Who is Timothy McVeigh? Who is Tim Tuttle? Robert Kling?_

You wonder.

*

You’re on another one of your walks in the desert when McVeigh tells you about his ludicrous plan.

“It’s time for somebody to do something.” It’s the sort of generic anti-government rhetoric he’s known for, until he keeps going. “I’m going to blow up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.”

“What — how?”

“You remember the Ryder rental truck we saw on the way to Kansas?”

“No way.”

“You’re going to help me with this.”

“I would never do something like that. I’m not going to help you, Tim!“ 

“We’re good together,” he reminds you. “You don’t ever think about it? Just the two of us on the road? Like desperadoes. You know what it was like last time.”

“I can’t leave Lori,” you insist. How could Tim even ask you that?

“I’ll prove it —”

“You’re a head trip, Tim.”

“Fuck you.” His voice is laced with the rage he seems so full of these days, but he keeps a straight face, trying to maintain his composure.

“I’ll never leave my wife, Tim. You have to know that.”

The walk back to your trailer is silent.

*

Less than a week later, Tim moves out of the mobile home. He gives you some excuse about not being able to handle the kids, but you know the real reason.

You get a phone call from Tim after he moves into a motel. Tim just can’t stay away, can he? He wants you to read another book - he’s always giving you stuff to read, _The Turner Diaries_, underground magazines, stuff like that. 

You suspect that’s not all he wants. You don’t know what to expect after the other night in the desert. This thing between you is a bomb and you know it, something about to explode. Tim is the fuse.

You take back the last book he gave you, some right-wing treatise, and exchange it for the new one. He directs you to read chapter two. “Are you taking any of this seriously, Mike?”

“Don’t blame me for not wanting to take part in your suicidal exploits.”

“I wish you’d listen to me, man. You’re stuck traveling the low road when you could be on the high road with me. Why can’t you see it?”

“Whatever, Tim.”

“You like to talk tough, but you’re fucking _domesticated_ now. Don’t you see? Lori and the kids have you on a leash.”

You don’t like the way he spits the word “domesticated” like it’s foul, like it’s a curse word.

“Help me with this,” he asks again, referring to his plot.

“I can’t,” you insist. Tim can try to convince you all he wants, but that’s not going to change.

Tim looks disappointed in your answer. He starts throwing his belongings back into his suitcase.

“Where are you gonna go?”

“To find a real friend. A real man.” Tim always finds a way to get in a dig at you, now.

“I am your friend, Tim, I’ve always been your friend.”

“I don’t know if we can be friends anymore, Mike.”

You know his mind is made up. Tim’s always been stubborn. You ask again. “Where are you going?”

“Colorado,” he finally answers.

“Great. Get fucked by a skinhead, then,” you retort. Is that his idea of a real man? 

Tim doesn’t answer, but after a long moment, his shoulders sag. “I don’t want to hurt you,” Tim says, frowning, like the idea is unthinkable.

You can’t meet his eyes because you know he can tell it’s what you’re imagining. You pretend Tim isn’t the reason you carry a pistol these days.

“You’re better than this, Tim,” you tell him, but your words fall on deaf ears.

*

Ten days later, on the morning of April 19, a bomb tears into the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. You’re shocked by the graphic destruction, but right away, you know it was Tim. _Oh my God, he did it_. You try to reconcile the images on the TV screen with the man you know. You can’t, so you keep quiet. _ Tim’s a good person,_ you think, at the same time thinking he’d been thorough in his selection - the building houses ATF offices, DEA offices, Social Security Administration, the Secret Service, and more.

Forty-eight hours after the bombing, the FBI knocks on your door.

*

You don’t tell anyone what you know. Why would you? You spend years lying for Tim McVeigh, until one day, you stop.

On May 27, 1998, you’re sentenced to twelve years for four felony counts. Your involvement with Tim’s plan leads you to be charged with conspiring to transport stolen weapons, transporting stolen weapons, making false statements to the FBI, and misprision of a felony (you plead guilty to all four counts).

After the trial, you’re transferred to Florence Federal Correctional Complex in Colorado. The recreation yard is brown and dismal, only marginally better than your small cell. You walk in circles, watching your back. You’re lost in your own head when you hear someone calling your name. You think you must be going crazy - you think it’s the wind, or a distant memory.

Again: “Mike!”

You turn around and hear the noise again. You follow the sound to a narrow window overlooking the prison courtyard, no bigger than four inches wide.

“Mike,” you hear again, definitely your name, and you realize who it is. _Tim_.

“Tim?”

You ask just to be sure, because there’s no way this is really happening. They say this is the most secure location in America. Tim is in Supermax, spending 24 hours a day in isolation. He’s not even allowed into the same yard as you; guys in Supermax are only allowed to exercise five hours each month in the dog run, a confined outdoor cage. _Tim’s not violent_, you think out of habit, even though there’s a husk of a building in Oklahoma that says otherwise.

“I was hollering at the top of my lungs,” Tim grins. “Is that really you?”

“Yeah, Tim, it’s me.” You try your best to look through the tiny window. Aren’t these stupid things designed to prevent something like this from happening? “You look good.” How good can a dead man look?

“I can’t believe this. I had to talk to you once I saw you.”

“I never thought I’d see you again.”

“Me neither. What a clusterfuck, huh?” Tim’s talking about his conviction like it’s congested traffic. “How’s Lori?”

You’re not sure why he’s asking, but his easygoing nature makes you trust him, and maybe that’s been the problem all along. “She’s managing. She’s with the kids, so that’s something, you know?" Considering all of the circumstances, your family is doing well.

Tim nods. “What about the mobile home?”

“Sold it.”

“What about you?”

“That’s a tough one, Tim.”

He smirks and nods like he knows. “And Les?” Tim’s always been close to your father-in-law, sharing Old West stories about outlaws, and more than likely, sharing ammunition, too. You’re glad he didn’t get tangled up in this whole thing.

“He’s all right. He got your letter.”

“Good, that’s good.”

For a minute, Tim’s just the guy you took home for Thanksgiving, your old Fort Riley bunkmate and not America’s deadliest domestic terrorist locked away in a 7x12 cell. You know that it’s Tim’s own actions that put him here, but you can’t help the pang of guilt that strikes you. There might be something after this for you, but for Tim, a concrete box is all he’ll ever know for the rest of his young life. 

“Hey Mike.” He doesn’t say anything else to you; just presses his fingertips against the narrow window.

You press your hand against the reinforced glass, a queer sort of handshake. He smiles. You know right away that Tim McVeigh doesn’t hate you. This is all part of the mission. 

Somewhere behind you in the prison yard, a guard catches on to your conversation, and you and Tim only have a few seconds before the guard tears you away to stop you.

_Three, two, one…_

You part ways.

**Author's Note:**

> I leaned heavily on Mike Fortier's testimony from the McVeigh trial for this; a few liberties were taken with the source material.


End file.
